


coruscare lumine

by vbligs



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-16 08:02:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16081907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vbligs/pseuds/vbligs
Summary: "coruscare lumine" light blaze





	1. Chapter 1

wpw im doing another one lmao  
ft  
sable macmillan and joshua "crispy bits" graham


	2. watching

lobotomized, heartless, and a spine of steel.

a halo of light oscillating around a scarred and shaved head.

a face too kind for the times, something too soft to be in a world so cruel.

eyes that never blinked, reminiscent of rocks in the stream - dead fish eyes.

a 5.56 mm gun with old words carved into the barrel and a pair of brass knuckles with two words embossed into cold steel.

joshua graham did not know what to make of this mechanical girl, seraphim halo and ungodly abomination in the eyes of god. man and machine in unholy union. but living, breathing, being new canaanite, it showed him the answer.

show the mechanical, old world girl kindness, the kind that her eyes lacked and face glowed with. treat her with respect, for she has been through much, the craters on the left side of her forehead and the obvious cranial scars are proof enough.

he watches her with eyes muddied by pitch and ember, watches as children trace the circumference of her scars and chase the steady beat of light that orbits her head.  
('angel, angel, angel,' it seems to sing with every rotation.)

watches as the first time one goes to touch her head, courageous enough to touch the cut that makes her seem put together like a kind of food, and she wheezes, dead eyes kaleidoscoping into a supernova of emotion as she darts back, slapping eager and idle hands away.  
(what happened out there?)

watches as she digs through old world wreckage to find pieces of scrap and old bottlecaps. the only emotion that cracks through is when she finds a mug - a sliver of a smile as she mouths a word, unintelligble, shoves the cup in her bag, and goes diving once more.  
(who is muggy?)

watches as she cracks open a fruit with her bare hands, flashes of light under her skin, and scrapes the innards out with hands rough and quick. watches her suckle the juice and plant the seeds when she thinks no one is looking.  
(for weeks afterwards, the plants are watered by him.)

watches as she comes across an old stash of shells and watches as she throws them in the air, dancing in a shower of gold, the bruises there for weeks afterwards.  
(no one asks.)

watches as she sticks her hand in the fire, long enough it starts to blister, long enough that his burns hurt in remembrance - and then pulls it out, poking and prodding and wrapping the flesh like he does.  
(later, he wonders if she is trying to understand him.)

joshua graham does what he does best.

he watches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i dont know if he has eyelids, but i imagine joshua watches often.


	3. speaking terms

there is a day where she breaks the silence, but only after he looks to be shot (it is the fluid from his burns) and it is so uncanny, it keeps him awake at night.

her voice is gruff from lack of use, and her halo is gone, replaced by a small crown of blood and paint. she kneels before him, looking as if she was about to pray for him, before pressing a finger to his wound, pushing, pushing, as if to plug a hole.

his hiss of pain did not stop her.

chapped lips crack apart and the voice filters through, dusty and dry like her mojave home;

"you will not die yet, joshua graham."

the next time she speaks, it is to ask him to apply a salve to the still healing scar that runs down her back

he imagined her voice would be robotic, disinterested, but instead, he is confronted with something choked with emotion.

it is only days later that he begins to carry a conversation. it starts out with him preaching, then morphs into her asking for him to read more.

"it grounds me," she explains, as she runs a hand through patchy hair that grows only in a few spots.

after that, he says a quick sermon before battle, and she thanks him with an outstretched hand, resting just above his shoulder, never one to complete the contact.

sometimes, when she wont sleep, he will hear her mutter strings of code into the empty sky. numbers pushed together for some unknown purpose - until he sees the augmented parts of her form in the sunlight.

there is one night where she reads softly from the book, the blue glow of her artificial halo casting soft light over their camp, and it strikes him that she may be more mechanical now, but has been released from the original paranoid and robotic mannerisms of before.

joshua graham feels jealous, for only an instant, but he feels it burning deep in the pit of his stomach all the same.


	4. touch and go

the first time joshua graham touched her, she screamed.

it was piercing, and it echoed through the canyons of zion, mixed with the sounds of rocks falling as she scrambled back, gun drawn and eyes alive, alive, alive. he did not flinch, hand still outstretched from where he touched her shoulder. it was only a tap, only a tap, he knew loud noises scared her, but this seemed unwarranted. was he such a monster that this mechanical woman feared him so much?

no.

it is later that night, when she comes forward, and as a means of apology, hands him clean, truly clean, bandages, and murmurs a quick 'sorry,' before walking back out of the firelight. he watches the way she sits, back not quite turned on him, blue halo gone for now, eyes roaming the arizona landscape. he wondered to himself what had happened, what had changed her from before.

before.

he wasn't supposed to know about before. before zion, before the big empty. he didn't mean to pry. but when he saw the picture of her, he was taken aback.

she wore blue, with a shiny pip boy on her arm. hair that stuck out every which way and eyes that sparkled, something mischievous and bright and alive. (alive alive alive.)

a vault-dweller once, turned to wasteland life. he finds her and hands it back to her wordlessly, for once scripture had no answers for him. the photo was old, old enough she'd have been a teenager at its taking, but make no mistake, it was her. she snatched it from his hands, looking vastly uncomfortable. she offers no explanation, he expects none, but he is taken back when she reaches out and touches the top of his hand in an almost friendly gesture, before pulling back, chewing her lip thoughtfully. she turned her back to him once more, and slept in the darkness.

the next time they touched, actually touched, was in battle. she was shot, him used him for support, spine to spine with him, and the cold metal under her skin soothed his burns. he could feel her breathing, her leaning against him, the way her mechanical heart beat. the way she wasn't human. somewhere, somehow, if he weren't the 'burned man' he would've been afraid. he felt her stagger, felt her inhale, before lifting up her old gun and taking the shot, splattering some white leg bone breaker's brains across the canyon walls. felt how heavy she was, how unnatural it felt. how her spine braced with every recoil, mechanically taking the brunt of it as to not hurt him. listened to when her suit frantically beeped 'all out of stimpaks! no med-x for the pain!' and she patted it with her free hand, soothing it with soft words of 'it will be okay. i will be alright.' how she mumbled scraps of scripture to help steady her shot. felt how she would crane her neck to check that he was still standing. felt how, when it was over, she staggered forward, as to take the weight off of him. felt her arm around his shoulders when he started forward, becoming a crutch until they made camp.

the third touch was when he had to patch her up.

he set her down as the sun set behind the bluffs, and in a voice of charred ash, he asked her to, 'please remove the clothes around the wounds.' how she complied shocked him. but what he saw underneath shocked him even more.

he had never seen her scars in the light of day, only by fading firelight. so when she pulled off her stealth suit, and revealed a pain map, a galaxy of scars, he couldn't help but suck in a small breath of surprise. there was a nasty, still healing (it had just started to scab, for gods sake), angry cut over where her heart was. another across her sternum. one across half of her trachea. ones on her arms, a deathclaw wound that had become a silver scar over her stomach, gunshot wounds peppering her left leg, bite marks still healing on her limbs.

he averted his eyes, opening the medical supplies, but not before she noticed his stare. with a shaking hand, she touched his, eyes fierce, alive for once.

"they are old wounds, from a time before. you may touch them, and me as well, for your medical procedure."

and that was all the explanation he got, before he went to patch her up, with her consent. his fingers shook (he didn't know why) when his fingers brushed past the bullet wounds in her thigh, sanitizing and gauzing and sterilizing and sewing up a new one. his charred fingers felt on fire as he dug a bullet out of her side, other hand pressed on that old deathclaw mark to help offset the pain with pressure. her skin was so cold, she was so vulnerable, this was more intimate than love-making, this was something that could only be done in the in-between times of day. once taken care of (three wounds in all) and she was wearing some soft cotton clothes, she turned to him. her eyes hadn't left his hands as he sewed her up, but now they rested on where his eyes might've been in the darkness. opening her mouth, she asked for a sermon, a scripture, something.

"i hurt, joshua graham. please, your voice and the passion for god in it soothes me."

the night ended with her fingertips barely touching his, the soft lull of his voice and the book mixing with soft sleeping breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when you go through leaving a vault, moving into a world where people try and kill you for bottle caps, being lobotomized, your heart and spine removed, bullets and knives and so much more, you tend not to like it when people touch you.  
> i think that even soft touches to old wounds can hurt more than the act of getting them in the first place.


	5. can of worms

joshua was not a curious man by nature. he was not rude, nor impolite (at least his sudden immolation had done him some good.)

joshua graham listened, he preached, he did not pry.

joshua graham could not help himself on the night that he did.

it was dusk - euphoric on the kill of a white legs camp and some strange root she had thrown in the fire, joshua loosened up around sable macmillan. loose lips sink ships, but it was a time for secrets, a half-light time. a proper time to be curious, he thought to himself.

"macmillan -" he had only ever called her 'courier' until now, "- why are you so...metallic?"

it startled sable macmillan, that was for sure. her head jolted up from its half sleep, eyeglasses dangling off the bridge of her nose (he didn't know she wore those,) and eyes came alive with a sandstorm of emotion. she struggled to find words, struggled with her own vocal chords, body autonomy stolen in an instant, voice cut short by the quick flick of a knife. she struggled, squirmed, opened and closed her mouth like a dead fish, until joshua could stand it no more and burst into life.

"you do not need to tell me, but i hope you will find i am trustwor-"

it was like a gunshot had gone off in the night - everything went still as her voice exploded from behind clenched teeth, eyes burning into the fire, a sort of bittersweet anger smoldering.

"i - i will tell you. but don't interrupt until...until the end," her voice tapered off, lip catching on teeth that shone in the firelight, hands everywhere and nowhere, fidgeting with anything that could be touched. she looked fractured but whole - on the edge of shattering and combusting all at once. she took a deep breath of air before continuing, physically straining to spit out her story.

"have you heard of the big empty?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a note on the next chapter: this one is going to be EXTREMELY different stylistically. its going to be choppy, going to be real, and its going to hurt.  
> talking about traumatic events is sometimes like living them all over again, so theres a warning on this one: dont read it unless you think you will be okay.
> 
> lastly, id like to thank my good friend a., because in swapping/reading stories, her style influenced me and inspired me.


	6. firebird  and the big empty

"the big empty?"

from the tone of his voice, she knew he didn't.

expected, but hard to rectify.

"it is...it's a facility. pre-war. filled with technology. doctors- they aren't...they're doctors of a sort," she was shaking, feeling the weight of her sinking into the earth. the ground seemed to chant 'unnatural, unnatural, unnatural,' with every second, only reminding her further of how she'd been stolen and molded away from what she was.

"it's a crater. used to be a mountain. big mountain - big em-tee. big empty. well, they were broadcasting. a - uh - signal. led me to a big satellite, crashed. waited until midnight-"

she paused, rocking backwards, eyes like a cornered animal. deer-in-headlights. joshua didn't know what to make of her - she was out of place, out of character, this was someone hurt.

he waited for her, heeding her warning of interruption.

"-waited until midnight. yeah...then, it lit up. light on a board - your name on it too - it was an-an eye. big, blue, moving all over. looked at the satellite, then i got woozy. it was all blue - all blue."

another pause, wherein he could hear her breath rattle and make out her touching the scar on her skull.

"all blue. woke up, and i felt...wrong. i was wrong. my head was too heavy, my back too hard, and my heart- o-oh god -"

'not human not human not human,' the earth seemed to whisper, old heat from the day leaching into her skin.

"my...my heart. i don't - i dont have one. joshua, joshua graham i do not have a heart. i do not have a brain. i do not have a spine. they took them - they took me apart like a - like a teddy bear! i was nothing to them, nothing! they stole me, they broke me, i'm - i'm not even human, joshua!"

his body said 'go to her,' his mind ordered 'wait,' he couldn't decide to be compassionate or let her finish.

before he could, she stood up, kicking rocks away, and said something about 'needing time,' before disappearing into the dark bluffs surrounding them.

at that point, he could not sit by idly and twiddle his thumbs.

he stood, softly, softly, and followed where she had gone to, only finding her by the curses she threw at the starts, the insults she spat at the sky.

"fucking dala, bastard klein, mobius, mobius the ignorant fool! i-i wasn't a doll! i am not a doll! doctor o and eight and fucking borous - fucking made me - i'm not a DOLL!"

she collapsed against a wall, voice cut short when she heard his footsteps.

they stood in silence, maybe fifteen minutes worth, before she spoke again.

this time, her voice was soft. vulnerable. broken.

"they told me mobius, a brain in a robot, just like them, had taken my brain. they put a bomb in my head and told me they'd only free me if the mentat-popping freak was killed. dogs - dogs everywhere. had to kill them - didn't want to."

joshua came closer, shoulder to shoulder with sable.

she needed it.

"found out where nightstalkers and cazadors came from - got scooped up. robots everywhere. poison in the air - a light switch tried to seduce me, my toaster threaned to kill me, and my ammo bench had a british accent and called me a 'lobotomite.' never talked to appliances before - don't want to again. have to...have to go back at some point. i promised."

"and - and when -"

another pause, another choked sob from sable. too dark to see her face, no halo this time, folks.

"- when mobius died, when i killed him, they wanted to keep me there. for...experiments. only reason i'm here and fucking functioning is because i got shot. twice in the head," she laughed now, barking and wounded, "you know, i'd be a normal courier if it wasn't for house. wouldn't have had to carry the chip across the mojave. wouldn't have gotten shot for it. wouldn't be brainless with so much blood on my hands."

"...joshua i'm damned. i know you and the dead horses and the sorrows and even daniel think i'm some sort of savior. i'm - i'm just a courier, joshua. i'm just some girl who left her home for water. i'm just some girl who got caught up in a mess between two people - a mess that touches the entire mojave."

he didn't know when she had turned to him, had started touching his bandaged cheeks, but as soon as he noticed, she drew back.

"joshua, you, me? we're casualties of a war we didn't fucking make."

and before he could respond, she disappeared back to camp, leaving him alone in his burning skin, thoughts crowding his brain, spilling over like the mojave's war.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow - this ended up tamer.  
> probably because macmillan didnt explain fully - i have to have content, you know.
> 
> enjoy this glimpse into what goes on inside sable macmillan's scrambled head.


End file.
